Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (51 page)

Topol’s tough Tevye could also be seen in America as a harbinger and a hero of emergent white ethnic pride. The immigration law signed by President Lyndon Johnson toward the end of 1965, abolishing long-standing national quotas that had favored Europeans, was beginning to have an impact, as America’s gates opened to Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. In the wake of these changes and the rise of Black Power, the notion of “Ellis Island whiteness”—as Matthew Frye Jacobson calls it, an ethnic whiteness distinct from WASPdom—was forged and the “ethnic revival” launched. In 1970, Congress had begun to consider a bill calling for an Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, enabling America’s children to learn “about the rich traditions of their forefathers … and the many ways in which these past generations have contributed to American life and culture” as well as increase their “awareness and appreciation of the multiethnic composition of our society.” It became law in 1972. In the meantime, when
Fiddler
was in post-production, the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak wrote his high-profile polemic,
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics
, decrying WASP supremacy and, in the name of Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, demanding the inclusion and special attention he saw Blacks accorded. “People uncertain of their own identity are not wholly free,” he wrote. They needed their “historical memory, real or imaginary … a set of stories for individuals—and for the people as a whole—to live out.”

The new ethnicity declared itself in particularly masculinist terms: Novak pugnaciously voiced blue-collar resentment; Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League upped the ante on their aggressive theatrics, brandishing baseball bats and lead pipes in a photo for a full-page ad in the
New York Times
with text proposing that “Jewish boys should not be that nice” lest they “build their own road to Auschwitz.” “Self-defense” activists in Italian communities—Newark, New Jersey’s, city council member Anthony “Tough Tony” Imperiale, for one—wielded serious weapons and turf-war rhetoric, too. In part, they were parroting the macho posing of the Black Panthers. They were also putting themselves forward as the arbiters of ethnic realness, in contrast to their mainstream leaders—wimps, they sniped, who would not stand up and fight for their brethren.

The Tevye of Jewison’s movie strode comfortably on this terrain. He could be read both as the lovable, rustic old papa and as the chest-thumping champion of ethnic survival—and these images did not necessarily contradict each other. The “unmeltables” characterized themselves as climbing up from a past of hardship to become responsible, striving Americans, and Topol portrayed a Tevye who, supported by the cohesion of family and ethnic group, did not falter on that paradigmatic path. Jewison had been drawn to the character’s humanism, the modern Jew-as-metaphor, but now, here was a
Fiddler
teetering upon a gabled point between assailed liberalism and the coming neoconservatism. The Jewish establishment worried at the time that the postwar “golden age” for Jews had played itself out, according to a cover story in
Newsweek
that was published in March 1971, some eight months before
Fiddler
opened in movie houses all over the country. Titled “The American Jew: New Pride, New Problems,” it reported that Jewish communal leaders (in contrast to blustering Meir Kahane, against whom the story pitted them) believed that “an era of unparalleled security and achievement for American Jews may be coming to an end.”

Those anxious Jews must have felt so good watching Topol’s sumptuous, emphatic arrival on the screen, looming so large in close-ups when he considers his daughter’s defiance that viewers are practically in his nostrils. Here was a reassuring rejoinder to the era’s disquietude and the community’s self-doubt: the reminder of how far they’d come. This was not shtetl nostalgia so much as bootstrap nostalgia. The image countermanded, too, the brash new depictions of neurotic Jewish masculinity that became prominent between 1967 and 1973: Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, George Segal—the fellows who slinked and slobbered onto the screen in movies like
The Graduate
,
Bye Bye Braverman
,
Goodbye Columbus
,
Where’s Poppa?
,
Move
,
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
, and all the Woody Allen pictures. J. Hoberman aptly calls them the “nice Jewish bad boys.” (Among women in the movies, it was only Barbra Streisand who flaunted her Jewish otherness in this period.) These young men—Tevye’s spoiled grandsons—made no effort to “blend in,” like the generation before them. But their display, unlike Tevye’s out-and-proud self-assertion, was insolent and crude.

*   *   *

For returning dignity to mass culture’s depiction of the Jewish male, Jewison was praised in a
Jerusalem Post
article as “one of the few filmmakers left anywhere who still believes a hero can be a good guy, and not necessarily a dope addict, drop-out, sadist, or at best, a loveable lunatic.” He seemed to be the only Hollywood director who respected “those old-fashioned virtues movie-makers have discarded, family, love, religion, and humor.”

Perhaps that’s why some people wanted to bring
Fiddler
home, where images of Anatevka might proclaim those very values. Before the advent of videocassette and DVD releases—and at a time when consumer culture was growing as a form of identification—
Fiddler
moved into living rooms through various lines of domestic tchotchkes.

Ceramic figurines of the characters went on sale, suitable for the display case or shaped to the needs of a host serving snacks: Tevye and the Fiddler as salt and pepper shakers, the house with chickens in the yard and violinist on the rooftop formed into a teapot, even Tevye and his cart as a chip-and-dip set. Chadwick Miller, one of the companies that produced
Fiddler objets
—in a factory in Japan—made music boxes related to any number of popular entertainments. Little porcelain replicas of Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw from
Love Story
, for example, sit atop a green pedestal, as if at a picnic, and when wound up, the music box beneath them plays the theme from the movie. A six-inch ceramic Tevye produced in 1972, arms up, fingers snapping, twirls to “If I Were a Rich Man” as his tune tinkles. But unlike the tragic lovers, he is more than a souvenir for an admirer of the film. Sold through distributors of Judaica, such collectibles allow the purchaser to participate in an American form of home decorating, but with a Jewish twist. Much like items from Israel, the objects confer and express a sense of group attachment through what the sociologist Herbert Gans calls “symbolic ethnicity” or, when people buy ritual objects for decorative purposes, “symbolic religiosity.”

The Tevye chip and dip set brings
Fiddler
into the home.

And there are loads of the latter, for sale to this day:
Fiddler
Hanukkah menorahs (arms aloft as in the “Tradition” number serve as candle holders), spice boxes (used in the Sabbath-ending Havdalah ritual) in the shape of Tevye’s house, complete with fiddler on top; even mezuzah covers with Tevye and Anatevka painted on wood or a fiddler molded from metal. The music boxes or tableware might mark a nonobservant home as ethnically Jewish, and so do the ritual items, but as much by dint of their
Fiddler
designs as by their religious functions. The ceremonial
Fiddler
articles are sanctified decor, the figurine Judaized and made functional—for identity-building if not religious practice.

The generation of Jews—and Americans—who would display such items was skewered in a January 1973 spoof of the movie in
Mad Magazine
—another means by which the
Fiddler
film seeped into the general culture. The seven-page spread, “Antennae on the Roof,” promised to update the “famous musical about the problems of people who had
nothing
” with a version “about the problems of people who have
everything
.” In this patriarch’s house, even the dog kennel has an antenna on its roof. Why? “Because here in the suburbs, a family is measured by one yardstick—POSSESSIONS!” To the family psychiatrist—a dead ringer for Freud himself—the family sings (to the tune of “Matchmaker”), “Headshrinker, headshrinker” about how much they hate their lives. Tevye dreams of being a poor man, singing, “I’d simply sign my name and draw unemployment…” As for the daughters, one runs off with a rock band to romp naked in the woods, the second leaves with a fellow dope-fiend, the third gives up her violent commitment to the revolution to elope with her girlfriend.

The panels are packed with cartoonist Mort Drucker’s extraordinarily witty and detailed drawings—the house and a pool, Princess phones, golf clubs, televisions, antique car, yacht. He rendered the Tevye figure as Zero Mostel, whose stamp remained on the role, his eyes rolling in one frame, staring maniacally in another, squinting with delight in a third, and in all the frames, a stringy, desperate comb-over stretched across his pate. Topol appears only at the end: as Tevye’s ancestor, coming to haunt the suburban man and wife in their unsettling dreams with the other Anatevkans—caricatures of the movie’s principals, twisting their mouths into scowls and shaking their bony fingers in accusation. To the rhythm of “Miracle of Miracles,” they deride modern humanity for what they take to be its excesses: industrial pollution, labor activism, Yippies, head-busting hard-hats. “But though God’s made imbeciles great and small,” they sing, “the one that bothers us most of all / Is that we fear that God may make a fuss / And … some … how … blame … you … on … us!”

What’s surprising here, and different from the typical
Mad
movie spoof, is that the cartoon doesn’t really make fun of the film. Rather, it uses
Fiddler
as a tool of critique, to lampoon materialistic success and its attendant hypocrisies. The repressed shtetl ancestors return to haunt the new generation, which cowers in its suburban brass bed. The comic reversal, where the past disavows the present—a gesture equally conservative and countercultural—suggests that late-twentieth-century American Jews (and by extension, Americans in general) had lost sight of the pure values that once bound them as a community and guided their actions. The familiar romantic shtetl is implied, despite Drucker’s grotesque exaggerations of its characters, and ethnic mixing made suspect: “God made a modern Camelot,” they sing of America. “Now that we’ve seen that / Mess you’ve made / We’re afraid / God wants back his melting pot!”

*   *   *

It’s hard to sustain a parody of the movie given its somber turn, harder still to make it the center of an evening of levity. Still, in recent years, the film has been called on to do important iconic duty on the most ironic Jewish celebration each year: Christmas. If “Chinese and a movie” has been a time-honored way for Jews to spend the day when nearly everyone else is otherwise engaged, increasingly that movie has been
Fiddler
, in coordinated events where people come for the express purpose, as cultural scholar Jeffrey Shandler has put it, of enacting their Jewishness. Synagogues, Jewish community centers, and clubs meant to attract young Jews program
Fiddler
sing-alongs as a means for multiple forms of such enactment.

But one doesn’t have to make a point of countercelebrating Christmas to sing along to
Fiddler
. At all times of the year, Jewish film festivals from Boston to Seattle have invited moviegoers to dress up as Anatevkans, shimmy their shoulders to “Tradition” and belt out the tunes along with the film’s cast. (The lyrics and dialogue are displayed in closed captions, for those too young to have memorized the songs in their suburban dens in the seventies.) In 2006, Bet Shira Congregation in Miami hosted a sing-along on Tu b’Shvat. The synagogue’s president, Ron Rosengarten, put on an old vest and a short-brimmed cap. Rabbi Micah Caplan pasted a long gray beard to his chin. And congregant Martin Applebaum donned a puffy-sleeved peasant shirt and stuffed his pants cuffs into the top of his socks. Applebaum also brought twenty rubber chickens to distribute among the audience so they could throw them into the air on the appropriate cue.

More than two hundred synagogue members came to join in the merriment. Children fiddled along with the overture and the babushka-clad sisterhood assembled near the screen to croon “Sabbath Prayer.” The twenty chickens were hurled when Lazar Wolf, toasting Tzeitel and Motel, said, “I am giving the newlyweds five chickens.” And chocolate Hanukkah
gelt
was flung toward the ceiling during “If I Were a Rich Man.” Synagogue member Barry Blum kazatzked during the wedding dance scene with a plastic seltzer bottle glued to his felt top hat.